AWS Clinches £93 Billion Verizon in Cloud Migration Coup

Global communications technology giant Verizon is moving over 1,000 business-critical applications and database back-end systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS), in a major coup for the perennial leader of the cloud hosting world.

The New York City-headquartered company, which generated annual revenues of $126 billion (approximately £93 billion) last year, will also migrate production databases to Amazon Aurora—AWS’s relational database engine, the company said.

Verizon has been hosting processes on AWS since 2015. The new deal is part of a broader corporate-wide cost-cutting exercise also intended to boost agility, Verizon said in a press release issued on Tuesday May 15.

“We are making the public cloud a core part of our digital transformation” said Verizon’s Mahmoud El-Assir, the company’s senior VP of global technology services, adding that the company is ditching proprietary solutions in favour of Aurora – AWS’s fully managed, MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible, relational database engine.

Verizon Cloud Migration Follows Oath, Highlights Scale

The announcement follows the same move earlier this month by Verizon’s Oath subsidiary, which also moved its Yahoo, AOL and other brands to AWS. Oath said AWS was the “obvious choice” because it is where startups host their data and it makes acquisitions easier. Comcast and Walt Disney are other large recent AWS wins.

In a customer profile from Dell EMC, which supported Oath’s migration of 70 petabytes of data to AWS in an earlier phased migration, the company said the company had reduced Oath’s data backup and protection costs by up to 67 percent and its storage and associated costs by up to 70.8 percent through efficient use of Amazon S3.

AWS, which dominates the cloud infrastructure services market with 33 percent, against second-runner Microsoft Azure’s market share of 13 percent, is a major cash cow for the company. Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO noted in the company’s recent Q1 earnings: “AWS had the unusual advantage of a seven-year head start before facing like-minded competition, and the team has never slowed down.”